ID vs. Abiogenesis

I am just curious as to what thinkatheist has to offer on the possibilities of intelligent design vs abiogenesis.

Remember that ID is NOT religion and doesn't even imply the existence of a deity. It is simply the idea that even the most basic theoretical form of sustained life is so complex, it couldn't possibly have started by itself without any intelligent intervention.

Your general line of thinking would require an answer of human intelligence or better. But in both cases it has nothing to do with humans. Simple observation eventually answers the question and it's not what the initial assumption would be. Pre-supposing an answer will often lead you to the wrong conclusion. The scale of time and possible answers to abiogenesis is beyond what you can conceive, but there is no reason to toss your hands up and say goddidit. I want to figure out who the engineer was that showed bees how to create Pentagons for their hive structure. There must have been an engineer involved for that strength and efficiency.

The ONLY thing one needs to support abiogenesis is an appreciation for stupidly long periods of time. Once you grasp just how long 2.5 billion years really is and do some simple math on the frequency of biodiversity and gene mutation, it is perfectly reasonable without any sort of creator at all.

Just because ID doesn’t identify the designer, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t imply a deity. The fact that you even have a designer to begin with does.

Jerod, you are splitting hairs when you say ID is NOT religion. It’s heavily based in religious argument and folklore, mixed with pseudo-science.

While on paper, ID may not specify the designer, in practice it does: Yahweh. Out of all of the possible design theories, how many are being are really being forced in public debate? One. The Christian theory of design. To point to the clever wording and intentional vagueness of the ID description as evidence to the contrary is just a bold attempt to deceive. ID is a Christian scam and not a viable scientific alternative.

I don't know what answers you are fishing for, ID is not science. It has no explanatory value aside from Goddidit, makes no predictions, and cannot be falsified. All IDers can put forth to bolster their "theory" is lame stuff like "I can't understand how something so complicated can exist, therefore God (or possibly aliens) must have done it." What is there to learn from that? It's a dead end.

Also, I'm not a big fan of the complexity argument because complexity is messy. Why should we need a dozen or so different organelles in each cell? Why does the Krebs cycle have to go through so many stages? What is up with the recurrent laryngeal nerve? Biology is so messy, wasteful, inelegant and inefficient. It's almost as if the current batch of critters *gasp* wasn't designed at all (let alone intelligently), but rather came together gradually, over time, from earlier forms.

The human eye is also badly "designed", and interestingly is sometimes brought up as being too complex to have evolved (Darwin is claimed to have said so, but the people quoting him leave out the "but" that follows). Yet it has a blind spot where the optical nerve passes through the retina and blood vessels passing in front of the retina.

Cephalopod (like the octopus) eyes have both those flaws "fixed". There are plenty of other design flaws in the human body like our spines or the appendix.

Intelligence seems to require a certain level of complexity. Intelligence capable of "designing" life would necessarily be quite complex itself. If the complexity of life implies an intelligent designer, how did the intelligent designer come to be? Magic? Abiogenesis?

No the designer always existed, because the designer doesn't exist inside time and space but entirely transcends these lowly natural confinements of the world we experience. The designer is perfectly transcendental. Complexity or simplicity are naturalist concepts and do not affect the true nature of the designer. The mind of the designer is at once unimaginably complex but irreducible and so much simpler than a single electron. The designer is beyond that sort of thing, because in the end it comes down to the this that the designer designed himself as a designer of himself. It was the most perfect thing the designer ever designed. The design was perfect but the execution faltered and along the way mistakes accumulated until enough of it was created that it morphed itself into a adversarial talking snake that later turned into the antagonistic undesigning entity who infallibly accepts all the blame for the designers numerous shortcomings.

Right, so the designer exists outside of time and space and yet directly affects things in time and space, but we can't detect it unless we believe with all our might, and it totally is unknowable due to its mindbogglingly simple/complex mind, yet somehow its believers know exactly what sorts of sexual activities it disfavors, and it is absolutely perfect in every way yet messes up its own creation because of free will or something.